Chapter 45
Ezra floated, suspended in a gelatinous green liquid. His face was slack and his eyes closed, and he seemed to be asleep. I stared at him for a long moment, searching for a sign that he was breathing, but found none. I swallowed hard. Was he dead?
I put my hand to the side of the tube. The glass was freezing beneath my palm.
No connection flared, nor did I sense that strange void like I had when I’d been scanning recovered bodies.
It was more like a barrier. Did that mean the glass was too thick, or that he was alive and maybe in some sort of cryo-sleep?
The second tube held a young man, maybe mid-twenties, with sharp features distorted by his silent scream of terror.
His eyes wide open, he was frozen mid-cry, body rigid, fingers curled like claws reaching out.
His hair was a pop of turquoise, floating around his head.
Ice was etched across the inside of the tube, like he’d gone in awake and fought.
I stared for a long minute, waiting for him to move, but he, too, seemed frozen.
Bones floated in the next tube, with some cartilage still stringing them together. My stomach churned. Was the fluid dissolving them slowly? What the hell was I supposed to do? Was there a way to free them?
The rest of the tubes contained people in various stages of decay. Dead, or dying? I touched one, the glass smooth and cool, though not freezing. The remains inside were barely human anymore, just bones strung together by stubborn threads of tissue, drifting like macabre puppets in the murky fluid.
With my palm flat on the surface, I tried like I had yesterday to sense the corpse, or any connection to life like a whisper of a soul.
Anything. That familiar connection that should have hummed between life and death remained stubbornly silent.
It was a void, like the corpses I’d been unable to call.
No whisper of a soul lingered, just a hollow void where personhood had been completely scoured away.
My magic recoiled, repelled not by death, but by the utter emptiness. This wasn't just a corpse. It was negative space where someone had been erased, absorbed—eaten.
The last impression made my heart race as if it came from some whispered source. Yet, as I glanced around the room, I couldn’t find any trace of a ghost.
I jerked my hand back. The remains inside collapsed in on themselves with unsettling finality. Bones dissolved into gray silt, swirling through the gooey fluid like ash in oil. A domino effect rippled through the neighboring tubes as, one after another, the suspended remains disintegrated.
"Fuck." The word escaped in a shocked exhale. My fingers tingled where they'd touched the glass, as if the void inside had tried to leech something vital from me, too. My soul, perhaps?
I stared at the blue-haired man and Ezra, feeling more desperate than ever to get them out.
But how? The tubes looked like some sort of science experiment in human preservation.
Neither had any controls that I could find.
Grates stretched across the bottom of their tubes, perhaps a way to empty them?
The scent of antiseptic tainted the air along with something metallic and bitter.
Old blood, though it was faint. My gaze swept across each wall, looking for a way out, or some sort of panel to open the tubes, or a door, but there was nothing.
A solid wall stretched behind me, as if I’d somehow fallen through it, rather than the doorway I’d seen in the hall.
I couldn’t imagine how freaked out Angel was, but hoped he found a way free of this insanity rather than finding himself in a crazy science experiment gone wrong with nightmare equipment to drain life.
Tables lined the opposite wall, home to all manner of vials, shining liquids, and strange instruments I couldn’t begin to comprehend. The air hummed with a thick, pulsating energy. Magic, perhaps.
The fairy-looking lights flickered overhead, the motion throbbing a migraine behind my eyes. Well, that wasn’t good.
I put my hand on the glass of Ezra’s tube again. “Ezra? Can you hear me?” Please don’t be dead. I had a feeling Angel would be devastated. Ezra remained still as the grave.
Not dead, my senses said, as if they would know first. Neither he nor the blue-haired guy gave me that sense of finality, even though neither seemed to be breathing. Okay then, that meant I had to engineer some sort of supernatural jailbreak.
I scanned the room for anything that could free them; a panel, a button, a tool.
Wait. I had my baton. I’d never used the damn thing, but it was always part of my equipment.
Would it be enough to break the glass? I snapped the stick off my belt and extended it to its full length, adjusted my grip, then swung hard at Ezra’s prison.
The impact jolted up my arm with a tooth-rattling clang but the glass didn’t crack.
Nor did the fluid move. I might not be a shifter, but I wasn’t weak.
I growled and struck again, double-handed, higher this time, putting my entire body weight behind the blow.
But the tube clanged as if I’d hit concrete instead of glass.
Maybe it was one of those bulletproof glass things?
I could try to shoot it, but that seemed a really bad idea in a sealed room.
The rebound might kill me, then where would they be?
I needed to free them, like, yesterday.
Think, Jude, think! I berated myself, scanning the room for other ideas. There were bookshelves made of metal, filled with specimens; tables filled with vials and jars of fluid, but not a single button or tool in sight.
My gaze snagged on an enormous jar at the far end, filled with liquid the color of blue Gatorade. Inside, something floated, and maybe moved? From where I stood frozen across the room, I thought I caught the flutter of movement again. Was it still alive?
I approached it with hesitation, eyeing the overhead lights and other jars with apprehension. Nothing else moved. And though energy swirled around me, something inside me categorized each still creature I passed as dead. Helpful, but creepy.
I tiptoed toward the container, trying to make out the shape. A tiny creature curled in on itself, limbs tangled, suspended in the glowing goo. It looked a little like a baby axolotl lizard with silver wings. Maybe this was what a faerie looked like?
My breath caught as a pair of tiny, dark purple eyes snapped open, locking onto mine with unsettling clarity and an unspoken plea. The creature blinked slowly.
Holy fuck, it was alive and moving!
The container had no lid, just a fully glass exterior like a giant water cooler sealed shut.
I ran my hands along the icy sides of it, searching for a break, but finding none.
The exterior felt like glass, not unlike the giant tubes containing Ezra and his companion.
The jar moved, the liquid inside jiggling like jelly, and it wasn’t secured to the table.
“Here goes nothing,” I said, and shoved with all my might, knocking it off the table. The glass shattered and blue liquid splashed in a wave across the room.
The tiny creature landed on the ground; wet, and horribly still.
I dropped to my knees and picked it up, instinct taking over.
I’d taken an animal first aid class last year with Nikki, with the thought that if anything terrible happened to Peanut Butter, I could help him survive long enough to get to a doctor.
Now, I used that knowledge to rub the creature’s chest, trying to feel for a heartbeat or movement of its lungs. But it lay still in my hands.
“Please don’t die,” I pleaded with the tiny creature, and pressed my mouth over the top of its snout, breathing oxygen into it.
Twice, and three times, before the little thing finally took a breath.
The fragile creature was pale, with shimmery scales gleaming under the dim light and a set of delicate wings tucked close to its tiny, shivering body.
I had a half second to fear that it had needed the blue liquid to survive and would die in the open air, but it breathed against me, its lungs sucking in air as it nuzzled tight to my side.
Was this like the lights overhead? They glowed bright but all I could make out were wings—all silvery, like butterflies pinned in the light to die as their glow vanished.
The creature trembled against me, shivering terribly, and I plucked it from my chest and shoved it underneath my vest and shirt, against my skin, to warm it.
As I rose shakily to my feet, I realized the blue liquid had soaked into the knees of my pants—which should have been waterproof—and a numbness was seeping into my legs with sharp tingles of icy pain and vanishing support.
I examined the blue globs splattering my pants, and saw that the liquid was eating away at the fabric.
“Fuck!” I cursed. Everything in this godforsaken world was lethal. I stripped off the gloves, as bits of goo clung to them, but I felt no change in sensation where the little creature touched me.
I stumbled away from the pool of ooze, heart pounding as I gripped the tables for support, and shoved my pants off, trying to peel the fluid away from my skin before it ate through my flesh too.
I tripped over the fabric pooled around my boots, but was certain the jar had been the same material that made up the tubes, even if the color was different.
Maybe the makeup of them varied by species?
Could I tip them over and break them? I eyed a metal shelf not far from Ezra’s tube, and forced my wobbling legs to hobble that way, pausing to cut away the fabric with my utility knife. My knees bled. Long, red drips warmed my shins. I didn’t have time to triage a scrape. I had to get Ezra out.
My heart raced, and the numbness crawled up my legs, spreading until I had to lean against the far wall, vision swirling as I gave the bookcase a shove.
It moved a little, but winded me. Well, fuck.
What was in that goo? Maybe I was losing too much blood?
The tiny creature curled against my chest beneath my vest, spreading a slow pulse of warmth, but I sucked in air as if I’d run a mile.
With the last of my strength, I threw my full weight against the metal shelving unit.
It groaned in protest before toppling forward, directly onto Ezra's tube.
The glass exploded, a shockwave of icy fluid bursting outward, and I hit my knees as the second tube erupted too, hit by shards of the first. Both men slid out in the rush of fluid.
All the other tubes shattered in a chain reaction, fluid filling the room, ankle-deep.
Ezra gasped and flailed, pulling himself out of the goo while I blinked at him from against the wall, unable to keep my feet as my legs screamed in pain.
The blue-haired stranger came up swinging, eyes wild with panic, scrambling to his hands and knees.
Two sets of confused and terror-filled eyes found me a second later.
“Hey.” I waved weakly. “Step one, complete. Free the sleeping princesses.”
“Fuck you,” Ezra choked.
“What’s step two?” the blue-haired guy asked, crawling away from the center of the tube toward me.
“Why are your pants down?” Ezra asked. “Are those duckies?”
“Long story,” I said. “Is the goo hurting you? Too cold? Anything?”
“Fuck, you’re bleeding,” Ezra said as he slipped and ended up lying a half foot away, on his back in the goo, staring up at the blinking fairy-light ceiling.
His breathing sounded narrow and strained, which worried me.
The blue-haired dude got to his feet, and it was the first time I noticed he had pointed ears. Fae? Or something else?
“Cold, but not hurt,” the blue-haired man said with a slight accent. “Maybe a little magically drained. Thanks for the rescue.”
I blinked at him as my vision narrowed around the edges. Pain and blood loss, or was the room getting darker?
The overhead fairy lights popped one by one, each extinguishing with a horrible, echoing scream that sounded far too human.
With each death, I felt a rush of energy slide through me, as if the dying creatures gave their last breath to heal me.
But the room plunged into darkness with only the dim glow of a few remaining intact jars.
The remaining vials shattered in unison, glass exploding outward like shrapnel.
I threw up an arm to shield my face. The stranger leapt across the distance, snatched Ezra up with preternatural speed, and barreled into me, shoving us all back into the wall as the glass and fluids rained down on us like daggers.
I heard the stranger react, like he’d been hit, but he held us against the wall, using himself as a shield.
The clarity of the room vanished beneath the rise of shadows. Was I going to pass out? Or was the darkness coming from the floor? Dark shapes twisted along the walls, expanding upward like living smoke.
The shadows surged, growing from the walls and devouring everything they seeped over as they spread across the room, a mass of black tendrils.
With my back to the wall, I had nowhere to go, and my breath came in ragged gasps as a nightmare erupted from the darkness—a giant, Cthulhu-level of hungry rage directed at us.
“Of course. Because evil science tubes weren’t enough.
Now we need the sentient, hungry darkness.
” I threw my arms up around Ezra and the stranger, trying to warn them of the coming darkness, but something grabbed me from behind and yanked me backward.
I clung to the other two as my vision popped and swirled with colors, threatening to suck me into unconsciousness, and all three of us tumbled through an opening in the wall that hadn’t been there seconds before.